Why Amazon Redshift is the best for your enterprise

I’m sure, rather more confident, that you might have come across the word “Amazon”, to the least as an Online Retailer. Do you Know that Amazon is becoming more of Technology company, that a retailer/Wholesaler? Its Technology division – Amazon Web Services(AWS) has recently overtaken the company’s retail division in Operating Income.

AWS has become more of a technology retailer. It has every service you need to run your business, be it provisioning a small server to hosting an Enterprise Data Warehousing(EDW) environment.

Amazon Redshift, a product of AWS is an Enterprise Reporting & Analytics environment that is highly scalable (up to petabyte), less expensive and fully Managed. It is a massive parallel processing Data warehouse solution that can retrieve the information need for Reporting & Analytics in seconds.

Here’s a list of key criteria to consider for a Data warehouse solution:

Managed Services vs Licensed Services

Elasticity

Accessibility

Cost

Speed

It is no surprise that AWS Redshift is a straight winner in all these. How? Let’s understand better.

Manageability:

The infrastructure of Redshift cluster is provisioned and managed by Amazon. As a user, a few clicks are enough to have the AWS Redshift up and running in minutes. The clusters and nodes are managed by AWS that liberates you from the hassles of License purchasing, setting up the servers & planning maintenance.

Elasticity:

The AWS Redshift clusters are elastic. It can be resized up and down as needed, when the capacity or performance needs change.

Accessibility:

Since Amazon Redshift is built on Postgres, it makes easy for Redshift to be easily accessed by most of the BI solutions through its ODBC & JDBC connectors. With SQL being most widely used language for data access, Redshift provides off-the-shelf capability to run SQL for data access, querying, analytics etc.

Cost:

Amazon redshift is aligned based on “You only pay for what you use”. It costs just $1000 per TB for a year. There are various pricing options such as On Demand & Reserved pricing (where Reserved instance options are available for 1 year or 3 years). The packages offer a wide variety of instance capacities that goes hand in hand with cheap pricing.

Amazon calculates that running a traditional data warehouse costs about $25000 per terabyte per year. But Redshift, on the other hand, costs only $1,000 per terabyte per year for its lowest tier.

Speed:

Amazon Redshift uses a variety of innovations to obtain very high query performance on datasets ranging in size from a hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more. It uses columnar storage, data compression, and zone maps to reduce the amount of I/O needed to perform queries. Amazon Redshift has a massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse architecture, parallelizing and distributing SQL operations to take advantage of all available resources. It is very much optimized for Data warehousing.